Findings

White women assume racists are also sexist, while black and Latino men assume sexists are also racist. Republicans who are overweight blame their habits, while overweight Democrats blame their genes. Americans’ meat-eating was found to be highly ideological, and the degree of a person’s “carnistic domination” tends to predict not only right-wing authoritarianism but also the odds of exhibiting benevolent sexism, hostile sexism, and symbolic racism. Students who wear a police uniform display biased attention toward images of people wearing hoodies. Psychiatrists hoped to assist “in the coping of agents of Law with the contradictory demands posed on them in an age in which God is dead, the father was murdered and the king was beheaded.” A negotiation experiment at the Wharton School of Business found that male participants became more aggressive and less chivalrous toward women following the election of Donald Trump. A study of pigtail macaques indicates that it takes very little to impose a new regime on a primate society.

Frogs and toads can still see colors when humans can see nothing at all. Male Siamese fighting fish, who usually lead with their right eyes when aggressing, favor their left eyes if they are on Prozac. Internet trolls cannot be changed. Swiss and Austrian psychologists isolated the brain activity that distinguishes laughing with from laughing at. Americans find the voluntarily childless to be morally outrageous. Regular, correct performance of Muslim prayers can improve low-back pain. Indian psychiatrists debunked a man’s claim to have gotten high via consensual cobra bite to the lips by interviewing the man’s snake charmer. A six-year-old Moroccan girl who presented with difficulty breathing was found to have a leech living in her throat. Delta waves were recorded in the brain of a Canadian man ten minutes after he died. A seventy-seven-year-old Italian man cries without emotion when he rubs together, or imagines rubbing together, his right thumb and index finger. The coincidence of goosebumps and crying in spectators of moving film scenes indicates peak physiological arousal. In all the contiguous U.S. states, the food associated with watching TV or movies is pizza, except Mississippi, where it is ice cream, and Wyoming, where it is cookies.

Scientists figured out why frizzy-haired people are more likely to hear the spooky noises preceding a meteor impact. The comet Chury was observed to contain sand dunes sculpted by a sunset wind. Platinum levels in Greenlandic ice suggest the Clovis people were wiped out by a meteor. Judean jars confirm that Earth’s magnetic field is fluctuating, not weakening. The Defense Department continued attempting to climate-change-proof its assets. Archaeologists theorized that the newly unearthed jade pendant of a Mayan king was interred to placate the wind god as civilization collapsed. In a Boston suburb, twenty turkeys slowly circled a dead cat. Bolivia declared a state of emergency over a plague of locusts. Biologists recorded the first instance of virgin birth in a shark who wasn’t a virgin. Scientists concluded a review of twenty years of undrogued drifters in the subtropical gyres’ garbage patches, released a detailed map of the Pacific Blob showing surface water temperatures up to 10º F above normal, and guessed that a white hairy blob washed ashore in the Philippines was a whale. By measuring artificial-sweetener levels in swimming pools, Canadian scientists deduced significant concentrations of urine.